subversion

Usually when I am wandering around on stackoverflow, there are times when I find some of the questions being interesting and bookmark them. Since this list grows day by day, it came to my mind to publish them for the betterment of the general public. These are the questions which I found good and don’t claim to be the “Best of StackOverflow”. You would notice the variation in the type of questions.

If you have your list, please let me know. The comment section is open for this noble cause. BTW here is the part 1 of the list.

Probably I am not so much qualified to enlighten others on this topic, but this is what I can see from my eyes.

Praise Python! Praise Linux! Praise any other FOSS technology! Now go and check what is being used in the corporations. I would like to list them down a few – .NET, IE6 , ActiveX, Rational Suite, Lotus Notes etc etc. Most of the technologies are either outdated or fully enterprise software. Half of them would be probably new for anyone.

.NET

Even when I was in college, all I used to hear was that .NET used to be an integral part of their requirement of any company that hits the campus. Even in the Internship last year, .NET was the religion. Even in all the jobs around why is .NET so important? We hear so much about Python, isn’t it? Where is it? When will it be adopted as mainstream popular development language?

Don’t confuse between .NET and Python. When we say .NET we usually mean C#.NET. This language was responsible for the success of the framework. We even have IronPython, but hardly anyone uses it. (Please don’t bring VB.NET in between). One reason is that since all of the language having .NET bindings generate MSIL, the language doesn’t matter. Since C# has syntax very similar to Java, it becomes a preferred choice even for beginner and experts.

I personally don’t like the .NET runtime. It is slow and hogs the resources. Visual Studio sucks more RAM and resources than the OS itself(read Vista). It is slow in response, freezes a lot. (Please don’t give bullshit suggestions to get a 4GB RAM Module). The only positive thing is C# which is very familiar and is probably the best language from Microsoft.

To make Python more famous, we need to look out from the standard modules and create a huge collection of libraries and organize them in categories. .NET has a bigger library for more functionality (makes it more heavy).

Source Control

ClearCase! I would keep my mouth shut over here, but the web interface sucks. Sucks bigtime! Doesn’t look like a web app in the first place. Upgrades are slow in enterprise and we are forced to use the old versions of any software which should be kicked out by now.

Why not subversion? I know some of my friends who say that their company uses it, but still ClearCase still has a big market share. Probably a big reason may be due to early adoption and a complete Suite. I have attended one conference of IBM Rational Suite in which I was really impressed by the way it was being explained. I hope people should get the point. Marketing matters as much as quality matters. Subversion may be excellent, but it needs an excellent marketing to make it more appealing. A rock-solid support is also needed.

IE6

Probably nothing sucks more than IE6 when web is mentioned. The usage of IE6 is highest in corporate offices. Employees are forced to use this stone-age browser because either their company policies don’t allow or they don’t have admin privileges or the worst of all – The smart-ass programmers made the company’s intranet to work only on IE6.

Operating System

Do I even need to mention this? All companies have deals with the software giant for bulk licenses to keep their systems running. They strike special deals if they ever need *nix systems. This decision is usually taken after lot of brainstorming.

This post was not to show someone superior or inferior. Just my point of view! Your point of view goes down in the comments section.